Infrastructures of schizophrenia: transforming psychiatric diagnoses at the local and global level in the twentieth century

Nicolas Henckes (1)

1 CERMES3 - UMR 8211 / U988 / UM 7 - CERMES3 - Centre de recherche Médecine, sciences, santé, santé mentale, société

This article uses the concept of infrastructures of diagnosis to propose a framework for telling the history of schizophrenia as a global entity in the twentieth century. Infrastructures of diagnosis include the material and architectural arrangements, legal prescriptions and professional models that organize the way patients come to clinics and navigate in the world of schizophrenia, as well as clinicians organize their diagnostic work. They organize the way schizophrenia was identified as a disorder. The article then explores three moments in the history of the infrastructures of the diagnosis of schizophrenia in the twentieth century. The first is German psychiatrist Kurt Schneider's discussion of first and second rank symptoms in the interwar period. The second is the work on the criteria for defining schizophrenia in the framework of the WHO International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia at the turn of the 1970s. The last moment concerns recent discussions on deconstructing psychosis the in the framework of the development of the fifth edition of DSM.

Mots clés: schizophrenia; infrastructures; psychiatric diagnosis; history of psychiatry

Domaines: Sociologie

Nicolas Henckes. Infrastructures of schizophrenia: transforming psychiatric diagnoses at the local and global level in the twentieth century. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 2019, 43 (4), pp.548-573. ⟨10.1007/s11013-019-09636-7⟩. ⟨hal-02422670⟩